Blog

Most of the week I've been back at MIT has been spent on Work Week at ET, where I live. During Work Week we thoroughly clean the house and do various maintenance tasks that we defer during the year or are just too big to do while classes are going on. This year, it started on Monday, finished on Friday, and lasted 9AM--5PM each day (except Wednesday, which was a half-day).

I spent the first couple of days working on the kitchen (which was originally scheduled to take four people four hours, and took three people three days instead...). The kitchen was... somewhat disturbing. Apparently our stools are light brown, not dark brown. And finding an ancient tin of caramel corn is not really pleasant... Oh, and our window sills are white, not dark gray.

Wednesday morning I took a brief break from the kitchen work to visit Home Depot with Katya and Chinua. For lunch that day, Alioth organized top-your-own-pizza, which was pretty awesome. Thursday I was back in the kitchen / dining room area. Thursday afternoon Adam and I raced to install some broom holders in the kitchen (our brooms and mops have a habit of falling in an untidy mess behind the door, which is annoying) before Rebecca and Chinua made enough progress on cleaning the grease trap that the smell made the kitchen uninhabitable. We managed... but not with much time to spare, I think. I spent the rest of the week doing yard work and some light tidying. Part of the yardwork was putting mulch in the front yard --- I'm pretty excited that it now has something better than "weed patch" or "dust bowl"...

Altogether, I was pretty happy with Work Week this year --- I felt like we were pretty productive, and spent very little time wandering around trying to figure out how to do my assigned task (which tends to be demotivating).

In some sense, Saturday was a continuation of Work Week. In the morning, Alyse (alumni corporation president), Ted (alumni corporation treasurer), Tony (ET commander), and I (ET treasurer) (plus some bored actives) spent several hours filling out the long and somewhat stupid Basic Data Form (?), which is required for accreditation. It was... painful. Once they left, I did ET treasury work (while watching Buffy --- that part was fun); that was followed by the traditional duck drawing and Princess Bride watching. After that, we went out for crepes. 'twas fun.

Onwards to REX and Rush!